She protested warmly against the Captain's lamentation respecting his age.
"The idear of any gentleman calling hisself old at fifty!" she said--and Horatio shuddered at the supererogatory "r" and the "hisself," though they proceeded from the lips of his consoler;--"you've got many, many years before you yet, sir, please God," she added piously; "and there's good friends will come forward yet to help you, I make no doubt."
"You talk as if you were telling my fortune with a pack of cards," he said. "No, my girl, I shall have only one friend to rely upon, if ever I am well enough to go outside this house; and that friend is myself. I have spent the fortune my father left me; I have spent the price of my commission; and I have parted with every object of any value that I ever possessed--in vulgar parlance, I am cleaned out, Mary Anne. But other men have spent every sixpence belonging to them, and have contrived to live pleasantly enough for half a century afterwards; and I daresay I can do as they have done. If the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, I suppose the hawks and vultures take care of themselves. I have tried my luck as a shorn lamb, and the tempest has been very bitter for me; so I have no alternative but to join the vultures."
Mary Anne Kepp stared wonderingly at her mother's lodger. She had some notion that he had been saying something wicked and blasphemous; but she was too ignorant and too innocent to follow his meaning.
"O, pray don't talk in that wild way, sir," she entreated. "It makes me so unhappy to hear you go on like that."
"And why should anything that I say make you unhappy, Mary Anne?" asked the lodger earnestly.
There was something in his tone that set her pale face on fire with unwonted crimson, and she bent very low over her work to hide those painful blushes. She did not know that the Captain's tone presaged a serious address; she did not know that the grand crisis of her life was close upon her.
Horatio Paget had determined upon making a sacrifice. The doctor had told him that he owed his life to this devoted girl; and he would have been something less than man if he had not been moved with some grateful emotion. He was grateful; and in the dreary hours of his slow recovery he had ample leisure for the contemplation of the woman to whom he owed so much, if his poor worthless life could indeed be much. He saw that she was devoted to him; that she loved him more truly than he had ever been conscious of being loved before. He saw too that she was beautiful. To an ugly woman Captain Paget might have felt extremely grateful; but he could never have thought of an ugly woman as he thought of Mary Anne Kepp. The end of his contemplation and his deliberation came to this: She was beautiful, and she loved him, and his life was utterly wretched and lonely; so he determined on proving his gratitude by a sublime sacrifice. Before the girl had lifted her face from the needlework over which she had bent to hide her blushes, Horatio Paget had asked her to be his wife. Her emotion almost overpowered her as she tried to answer him; but she struggled against it bravely, and came to the sofa on which he lay and dropped upon her knees by his side. The beggar-maid who was wooed by a king could have felt no deeper sense of her lover's condescension than that which filled the heart of this poor simple girl as she knelt by her mother's gentleman lodger.